Is it possible, for example, if a computer has a virus, for the router to get infected?? I know most routers are either Linux-based or use some other non-Windows OS.

My concern is that one of my friends PCs had a virus on it, and he disconnected his PC from the router. Then, after he did that, I plugged my laptop into his router. Is there any way my computer can get infected from the router even if his computer was disconnected first (and assuming that my computer is the only computer connected currently.)?

My friend had a virus that accessed their homes router and changed the settings so that all traffic was going through a server in Amsterdam. Drove me nuts trying to figure out what was going on because even after the virus was removed and a complete dban of the drive there were still online pharmacy ads on every page.

Hmmm... well wouldn't a firmware update fix this problem (because the firmware essentially would update the router's operating system/software)?

well the router never really was infected with anything, my friends laptop had a virus that just logged into her families unsecured router using the default admin passwords and changed some of the addresses so that all traffic was sent through a proxy that would replace all ads with their own. We could have updated the firmware, but considering that i was working on her laptop remotely from about 4 hours away, i didnt want to risk having the update fail for whatever reason and being left with no way to fix her system. I just had her reset the router to the factory defaults and everything was back to normal.

I don't know... i guess it doesn't really matter. As long as the infected computer is not connected to the router, then it shouldn't be an issue. I suppose a good reset wouldn't be a bad idea either (Except for re-setting all the settings can be a pain, unless you make a backup of the settings prior to the master reset).

I was more or less just curious if a router could house a virus or malware because I do (from time to time) have to deal with PCs with viruses (And I know they have them, so I disconnect my PCs from my router so I can work on the infected PC and so I can go online with that computer if I need to without having worry about infecting my computers). I just wanted to make sure it was OK to plug my computers back in after I've disconnected the infected computer from the router (or would I need to power-cycle the router first just to make sure).

Yes a router can, I had one. For the last year or so we've had all sorts of computer problems.

A redirect virus that affected search engines every time we clicked on a search result we got redirected to another pagethe Control C copy function stopped workingA few web pages we couldn't get to (Kodak pictures was one)Every now and them for no reason web page loading got extremely slowSometimes while reading one page the computer would spontaneously jump to some random page

Then I discovered the redirect problem also occurred on my IPhone, but only when I used the wireless connection at home. This indicated it wasn't a problem with my computer but with the Verizon FIOS Router. Sure enough I got a new router from Verizon yesterday and all the problems are gone.

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